Parts Per Billion
by icy roses
Summary: Percy reflects on happy endings and fallen comrades. Futurefic. Percy/Annabeth. Spoilers for House of Hades.


**we can dance around the clouds up here:** Spoilers for House of Hades. Short but contemplative and really randomly philosophical. An ode to Bob and happy endings. Please enjoy.

**song choice: **_Yesteryear_ by Rosi Golan

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**Parts Per Billion**

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Percy manages not to remember it most of the time, but his memories resurface at the strangest moments. During a lull at the breakfast table when Annabeth is trying to get their youngest to eat _anything_ without spitting it up or throwing it at the twins. While they're settling in at night and he looks over at Annabeth with her new reading glasses balanced on the bridge of her nose, tucking into her latest doorstop of a book.

He means Tartarus, of course. It's one of those things that's difficult to forget. Every once in a while, though, he's just brushing his teeth, and his wife has her fingers around a piece of floss, working it through her teeth beside him—one of the most irredeemably unsexy activities ever—and it hits him. That she was there with him at the very bottom of the world. And it just doesn't seem possible to him that they made it out, and that they're standing here today, working middle class jobs, raising _three kids_, and everything is good, so unbelievably good.

It's a stroke of luck he'll never understand, and one that he has a hard time trusting.

After a while, Tartarus becomes a blur of sorts. What he remembers is the steam, and redness, and a breathing earth. The terror caught permanently in between his throat and lungs. And the black, inky Night that seemed to go on and on forever.

When those memories strike, he tries his best to shake them off. The kids usually can't tell, but Annabeth can. She can every time, because she knows him too well and she has them too. She takes his hand and saves him, like she always does, and he'll know that it's over, the monsters are gone, and they are _here_.

But then, there are times he remembers, when it really hurts. Bob and Damasen. Bob and Small Bob before the elevator doors slipped shut. Damasen and the last glimpse of him charging Tartarus with the drakon. Somehow, through the final battle, Percy kept thinking that maybe the gods would have granted the heroes a boon for turning against their kin for Olympus. Because recklessly, bravely, Percy and Annabeth knew of loss, but they always chose to believe in hope. That they could save everyone. They had to believe that.

In the end, though, they never saw Bob and Damasen again. They looked, after the carnage, and asked about. It was Nico, finally, who told them, hands empty and eyes hollow that Bob and Damasen—well, they just weren't coming back. Tartarus was right. They simply vaporized, and there was no afterlife, no being regenerated in the bowels of the underworld, and no reappearing in America. Just … nothing. "I can't sense them," he said then. "They're gone."

What did it mean, Percy thinks, to not exist anymore? To have no consciousness and be wiped out of the universe? The idea of it is unfathomable to him, like a bottomless well, an infinity of galaxies, all of the molecules in the sea. He can't wrap his brain around it.

His children know about them. He and Annabeth kept their promise. But although at the time, it was the best thing they could say to their friends—a poor, weak goodbye—now, he doesn't know what it all meant. His children are sweet and bright. They look at the world with wondering eyes and fresh dreams. They can't know the horror. They will never understand the weight of that sacrifice. And Percy doesn't want them to. He wants them to live with innocence. The things he and Annabeth can never have, but that they fought for so that the children wouldn't want for it, at least.

When he runs his hand through his sons' hair, one light and one dark, when he kisses Annabeth before he goes to work, he believes in righteousness, in fate, and in love. In the goodness of life. He believes in his soul that nobody can just disappear without a trace, put out, like a sputtering flame.

He's no philosopher, not a particularly religious man either (how can he be, knowing what he knows and seeing what he's seen?), but he thinks that maybe, there's somewhere monsters go when they're cut out of the cycle of death and rebirth. Maybe, they aren't just _gone_. Instead, maybe they're released into water and air, subatomic particles, and spread out across the world. Blowing with the wind. Falling with the rain. Maybe they don't have a consciousness, but Percy remembers how Bob liked the simple things. Bob would like watching, just _being_ part of everything. No more hurting anybody. No more pain. He would have wanted that, even. And really, it seems as happy an ending as any.

So on blue-sky mornings in New Rome, when they go on the balcony to see the sunlight hit the highest windowpanes of the high-rise across the street, Percy holds his daughter's hand and tells the sun hello for Bob. As he kisses his daughter with a heart full to overflowing and lives to see another day, he thinks that maybe somewhere, or everywhere, all around—Bob is listening.

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**author's note:** I had to write something about Bob! It was breaking my heart. Also, fun Easter egg is fun (for me): the kids in this story are in my own head!canon from Three (Jordan, Nathan, and Sofie). Thanks for reading.


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